Saturday, March 28th, was the third of the “No Kings” protests against Trump. People came out in hundreds of cities and towns across the US and internationally. In Madison, Wisconsin, about 6,000 people rallied and marched. Kim Gasper-Rabuck, a member of Socialist Horizon of Madison, spoke at the rally. Below is a transcription of Kim’s speech.
By Kim Gasper-Rabuck
Thank you for letting me say a few words this morning. I know a lot of folks in Madison, but if we haven’t met, my name is Kim Gasper-Rabuck, I’m a mom, educator and a revolutionary Socialist and a member of Socialist Horizon of Madison.
There are hundreds of thousands, quite likely Millions of people around the world protesting Donald J Trump today. I am happy to be amongst those millions. We all want to protest this extraordinarily racist, misogynistic, transphobic, imperialist, capitalist piece of shit.
The reason I was hoping to say something today is because in my humble opinion, Donald J Trump isn’t the root of the problem, rather he is a symptom of a capitalist system in crisis; one that exploits and oppresses us all to create profits for the few.
Donald Trump didn’t isn’t the reason we have a trillion-dollar war budget. The war budget grows astronomically year after year regardless of which capitalist regime is in power.
He didn’t cause there to be 40 million hungry Americans. Dr Martin Luther King Jr spoke of the 40 million hungry Americans back in 1967. Neither party has made a dent in that number.
Trump didn’t create the military industrial complex, the US prison system, or the school-to-prison pipeline. All of this exploded in growth during the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Biden administrations before him.
He and the Republicans did not single handedly create the climate crisis.
He didn’t start the epidemic rates of sexual assault we all face.
He did not end abortion rights and was pro-choice for decades.
He neither created ICE and Border Patrol, nor did he begin deportations and detentions—although he did expand them to epic proportions! All this monstrosity was created previously.
And he was not the president who initiated the funding and arming of the systematic genocide of the Palestinian people. Joe Biden and Kamal Harris did that!
They gave the murderous Zionist Benjamin Netanyahu the green light over and over; sent boatloads of bombs and weapons to slaughter over 100,000 Palestinians, while lying through their teeth tot eh people pretending they were “arranging a ceasefire”.
Trump continues these crimes, but empire is a bipartisan team sport.
It was Democratic President Harry S. Truman who was the person who murdered the most human beings at one time and place to defend the US empire, by dropping two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and incinerating more than 150,000 people.
The Republican and Democratic Parties have committed those atrocities at the behest of the US capitalist class, working hand—in—glove to carry out the will of the billionaires who want more profit, oil, and power.
The Persian Gulf region holds the largest combined reserves of crude oil in the world. Both parties control the US government to act as guardians promoting and defending militarily the financial interests of Exxon Mobile, Shell, BP, and Chevron. US (and aligned international capitalists) in that region. They have for decades wanted to control Iran and re-install a new puppet dictator like the previous Shah of Iran so they can rule Iran once again on their terms.
Under Obama, Trump and Biden, both parties have overseen the building of 30,000-pound “bunker-buster bombs” for the expressed purpose of attacking and destroying Iran’s bunkers and to obliterate their leadership. Trump’s disastrous war is the inevitable outcome of a process already in the works.
Today, we sit at the apex of a massive regional and potential world war costing more than a billion dollars a day of tax payers money, your money, in a country most Americans could not find on a map, and who on its first day bombed and martyred 185 little school girls in their classrooms.
Now the government prepares to authorize $200 billion dollars more to expand the war and is sending invasion forces. The supposedly enraged democratic party politicians have chosen not to call the masses onto the streets to stop the war, they have not recommended the whole country go out on strike to stop this war, which is exactly what they could do to ensure this war was brought to an immediate end.
Rather they complain loudly that they were not asked to authorize this war themselves through the “War Powers Act”, and have now chosen to go into recess for two weeks as if they were college students on Spring break.
It’s essential we be 100% honest, the Democratic Party has never met a military budget or cop budget they didn’t like.
So while Palestinians, Iranians, Cubans, Venezuelans, Lebanese, Syrians and others are being attacked, experiencing embargos, suffering massive loss of human life, experiencing starvation, amputations, and other unimaginable forms of violence; the Democratic party officials who run these No Kings Protests didn’t come out and scream at the top of their lungs to end these imperialist wars of aggression.
This Demonstration, today March 28th is the first day of the most massive anti-war movement this country has ever known. They should have done, but they chose not to, because their party is just as enthusiastically imperialistic as Donald J Trump’s.
Capitalist and imperialist parties won’t end the war, but we can!
There are forty million hungry Americans having their food stamps cut. More than 700,000 of those people, most of whom are children, seniors, and disabled, live here in the small state of Wisconsin. More than 40,000 of those live here in Madison.
My friends don’t have enough money to put food on the table for their children and buy detergent to wash their clothes at the same time.
Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers here in Madison, including around 30,000 women, men and children, fear going to the doctor, to work, grocery shopping and to school because of ICE terrorizing and stalking through their neighborhoods.
None of us can afford to pay back our government student loans, with total debt currently at $1.6 trillion dollars, double the amount owed in 2016.
Our adult children are paid so poorly that they live with us into their 30’s whether they want to or not.
Last month we experienced the largest number of auto repossessions in US history.
And we pay for our individual health care crises through GoFundMe campaigns and personal bankruptcies because about 30 million people don’t have health care because we have no national socialized healthcare system.
The food pantries nationwide are running very low.
We are overworked, understaffed, underpaid, and our jobs suck, with extensive hours, little or no benefits, poor working conditions, and with oppressive bosses. We get fired and blacklisted for trying to form unions.
We have unnatural disasters like floods, fires, PFAS contaminated water, soil and air due to climate change.
We don’t have the resources to get abortions where they are still legal.
Queer people can’t use the bathroom of our choice, play sports, or walk down the streets at night with fear of being bashed.
That’s the reality and it is an unsustainable reality, one I’m not willing to live with any longer!
The United States is the richest country in the history of the world. Global capitalism could feed all the people of the world and keep them fed. There is no such thing as scarcity, there is only the legal and organized theft of most of the wealth we produce and stolen by the bloated billionaires and warmongers of capitalism.
There is no reason for any of us to go without! There is only capitalist-made scarcity, inequality forced upon us because of the profit driven system. There should be no millionaires, billionaires, or trillionaires. There is no need for the ruling class of parasites.
We deserve better. We deserve it all. And we should take what is ours, the fruits of our labor—back.
We must all come to see we aren’t going to vote our way into a new world order, clearly the two-party system has historically and will continue to guarantee our suffering, more lives lost, more abuse and rape of women and children—but only for as long as we let them.
A beautiful, free, collective, humane society is truly possible, and it will only be birthed via revolutionary struggle. I am a member of Socialist Horizon of Madison, and if what I’ve said makes sense to you, I hope you will join us for our next public meeting where we’ll be discussing what socialism is and how we get there. Please join and participate in a hands-on mutual aid project, Saturday April 11th.
